Yesterday Microsoft posted a piece of news very important to all modern web developers – they are reversing their decision regarding the default behavior of IE8.

For those web developers who have been too busy to check their feed readers lately – here’s the short version of what’s been going on:

Microsoft let us know that they were planning to implement a ‘new’ method of … well, let’s just say they wanted to give the browser an identity crisis. The decision they came to was that IE8, although it would be much more standards compliant than IE7, wouldn’t act like IE8 by default. It was decided that IE8 would act like IE7 unless you specifically told it to act like IE8. This decision was backwards, illogical, potentially a huge issue for developers, and really just a waste of all those new ‘bells and whistles’ the IE8 is supposed to have in terms of how well it renders website code.

The way they had planned to make this work was to have developers add a meta tag to all pages that they wanted IE8 to actually read using IE8, instead of IE7. Aka: Modern browser sniffing comes into IE8.

I think that Eric Meyer sums it up nicely in his post where he indicates that not all issues with the meta tag are gone (which will still exist but not be required to make IE8 work as the new browser), but that this is a huge difference for the better.

There is also some curiosity about whether or not this change was made due to current legal issues affecting Microsoft, as in their press release the following is found:

“While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.

In any event, the new IE8 will now act like IE8 by default (what a concept!). It is a sound, logical decision. I do have some concern as to how they will respond if the beta comes out and there are many complaints (as there have been with past browser versions) from web developers who didn’t prepare themselves and their sites for the change. I hope that MS won’t be easily swayed later toward reversing this decision again going back to the previous one just to appease developers who were lazy in their preparation, because this change will help developers who work with modern technologies – and those developers are the ones making the real innovation these days.

2 Responses to “IE8 – Browser Identity Concerns Fixed”

Since the ie8 displays web sites totally different depending on the graphic card and screen, I hope it will not come out until the rendering is as good as in ie7.

Otherwize I’ll send them my very old 1024 * 768 screen and they might understand. If only newer systems exist I wouldn’t say anything.
But there are still many ppl in the world still using elder systems.
The pages are not readable on these anymore.
Even the toolbar-pictures are rendered horrible.

This would be the first time a web designer would not have any chance to present proper internet pages to everybody.

I wonder why I’m writing this, cause usually I don’t care a lot about ie6, but ie8 was the biggest shock ever. At least I had to uninstall ie8, this devtool and reinstall ie7 !!

So long I appreciate the good will with the new devtool in ie8 on my other system, but firebug is so much better (mark you not firefox).

I can definitely sympathize with your frustration. MS needs to consider people who do not have the newest of everything and who do not only use Windows if they don’t want to continue to lose their grip (slowly) on the browser market.